“Yes! Mrs. Peele never was called upon to drop the morphine until after twelve o’clock. Were you in the habit of lying awake until late?”
“Yes.”
“But on this night you went to sleep early?”
“Yes.”
“You heard or saw—you are on your oath, remember—nothing whatever until Mrs. Peele called you?”
“Nothing.”
“You can go.—She is lying,” he whispered to Patience. “Damn her, I’ll make her speak yet if I have to throttle it out of her.”
Mr. Peele was the witness next called. He was treated with extreme diffidence by the district attorney, and even the judge gave him a fraternal smile. He told the story of the momentous night with parental indignation finally controlled, then, in spite of repeated “objections” and constant nagging, the significant tale of wifely indifference and desertion, and read to the jury “that cruel letter written to a dying man” the day before the defendant returned to nurse her husband. He repeated with the dramatic effect of the legal actor those dark insinuations of the prisoner: “You had better let me go! I feel that I shall kill him if I stay!” And later in the town house when she had struck her husband in the face: “You had better keep him out of my way. Do you know that once I tried to kill my own mother?”
He told of her eager interest in untraceable poisons one night when the subject of murder had come up at the dinner-table, her cold-blooded analysis of human motives.
Then he passed on to the painfully significant history of the day before the death: her demand for a divorce; her fury at her husband’s refusal; her acknowledgment that she had quarrelled violently with the deceased a short time before calling the family to his death-bed.